A Compass and A Map

I have lived most of my years in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, but I’m a North Carolina girl at heart. Born in the town of Williamston, those early years were lived among my mama’s hard-working people. Farmers who raised tobacco and chickens and grew peanuts and dug sweet potatoes. Their humble lives impacted me in ways I wouldn’t fully understand until I began to write.

My first stab at storytelling was inspired by Mama’s life, raised on a tobacco farm with no running water and no electricity. Her family of 15 siblings was comprised of yours, mine and ours, and their energy filled the plain farmhouse that had no indoor plumbing. Featherbeds were jammed into bedrooms and the smallest children were lined up widthwise like firewood that was stacked beside the wood-burning stove. A row of pegs on the walls held coveralls and cotton shirts and long johns. In the parlor, thin washcloths for bathing were piled beside the porcelain pan of water on the pot-bellied stove. At meals, the family took turns sitting at the table. Men ate first, children second and women last. It was a smooth-running operation that evolved out of necessity.

My first 10 years were spent running barefoot in and out of screen doors chasing dozens of cousins, watching ice delivered to the wooden icebox on the back porch, welcoming baby chicks in a cardboard box with holes in the sides, and smelling gold-leaf tobacco curing in the barns. My sister Glo and I lived with our parents in Robersonville next to the railroad track in the upstairs rooms of a wood-framed house. One memory goes that when I was three years old, I climbed out the window onto the metal roof to watch a train clack by. Another said I ran away on my tricycle to join the carnival but was intercepted by an uncle. I came to believe that every gray hair on Mama and Daddy’s heads was likely caused by me, since my sister was the docile one. 

So now you know from what humble roots I grew, but you don’t know about the moment of enlightenment that I could not have predicted: the discovery that my spirit home is the mountains.

To understand this cosmic shift in my history, I point to the homing pigeon. Evolved from wild rock doves, homers can be taken a thousand miles from their nest and set free to find their way back. They do the impossible because their brains have both a compass and a map. The compass relies on the sun to help them fly in the right direction. The map allows them to compare where they are to where they want to be. Their beaks hold iron particles that detect the natural pull of the north-south magnetic fields. They hear the low frequency infrasound that emanates from every rock, root, clod of dirt and rustle of leaves, then they seek the familiar song that belongs to them. Their magic ticket to home is good vibrations.  

I had my good vibrations epiphany on July 5, 2014. I had arrived on the Wildacres mountaintop in western North Carolina after driving the gravel twists and turns to the top and breaking into a paved clearing. I had come for a weeklong workshop to write alongside 99 like-minded souls, all on their own personal quests. What I wasn’t prepared for was the powerful sense of place that washed over me as I sipped box wine from a plastic cup at the get-acquainted social hour, and looked out over the ripples of blue stretching toward the setting sun. A physical force rose from the earth and enveloped me in a homecoming hug. It loosened the tightness between my shoulder blades, expanded my lung capacity and stirred dormant imagination. It was an instantaneous mountain high.

I mean no disrespect to the flatlands of my official birth, but at that moment, I knew whence I came. I believe we are wired like the homing pigeon with an imprint in our DNA that lures us onward with sound waves created by our particular journey. We instinctively seek where we belong. I arrived that July blue-sky day filled with the scraps of a novel whose parameters were nebulous. When I left a week later, If The Creek Don’t Rise had found its setting in the distance, back in forgotten hollers of saints and sinners in fictional Baines Creek. A place self-governed by imagined souls living in the pivotal year 1970. 

I am often credited with having come from those mountains because the language I use and folks I write about feel authentic. And while I did my part to research and discover truths of that time and place, I believe my spiritual roots growing deep in the hills of western Carolina are what is at work spinning magic. And it’s from those roots that my writing gift (apparently) shines best.  

My second novel, All The Little Hopes, is set once more in North Carolina. The WWII story starts in the tobacco flatlands to the east where I was born and my mama was raised. Before she died she gifted me with a truth about German POWs working tobacco alongside field hands, and that spawned my curiosity. But late in the book the story shifts westward to the mountains. Shana Drehs, my excellent editor at Sourcebooks, noted the change in tone when the tale returned to the smoky mountains of Appalachia. She sensed the homecoming I felt as my characters climbed into the high country and breathed the mystery and miracle I feel every time I return. That love is evident in the chapter excerpt I’ve chosen to share with you. 

All things considered—especially the marvel of homing pigeons—maybe Thomas Wolfe wasn’t being fair to this place called home for its pull is irresistible and innate. It is primordial.

Read an excerpt from Leah Weiss' novel All The Little Hopes.